My Unconquerable Soul
by Ju-dou
Summary: VE Day, 1945. An additional epilogue to The Silent Land. Cast me gently into morning, for the night has been unkind...


_A/N: For foooolintherain. An additional epilogue to The Silent Land. The title is from the poem, 'Invictus' by William Ernest Henley, and the poem extract below is from 'Everyone Sang' by Siegfried Sassoon. _

_Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;_

_And beauty came like the setting sun:_

_My heart was shaken with tears; and horror_

_Drifted away… O, but Everyone_

_Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will_

_never be done._

May 8th 1945, VE Day

_Let us remember those who will not come back: their courage and constancy in battle… we have come to the end of our tribulation and they are not with us at our moment of rejoicing. _

The day came, and it was like any other. Yet the pain did not die; it ripped and tore a little more. Matthew looked down at his hands tensed on his legs, and he was glad he was alone in the room. He didn't know what it was that he felt; something of what tingled across his skin must be relief, a lightening somewhere, a rush of air. The room felt suffocating and he reached up to tug at his collar, releasing the top button and letting out a short burst of breath, his other hand clenching around his knee. Matthew gritted his teeth, narrowing his eyes and willing the wireless to be silent. He did not wish to hear anymore; he wanted the feeling to pass, to experience something other than this, this breathless panic that was pushing on his chest. It fell upon him and he was stumbling, supporting the man beside him, and the land all around was rutted and barren and silent; it was so very silent, as if the end of the world had come. He thought then that perhaps it had, perhaps they were dead. He could not remember when he realized it was not a dream. Capture had been swift, and they were bleeding vessels staggering into no-man's land, guns at their backs.

_Take me home._

It was as if he had come close to a wall in the dark: he reached out but he could not feel its solid surface: he could not see, and he could not push past it. He didn't dare move in case it came and met him in the face, smashing against his jaw, shattering his cheekbones and breaking his nose. One morning a month ago he had received a phone call as he was closeted in the library, and the voice at the other end of the line had been so startlingly familiar that he had felt every muscle in his hand contract around the receiver. The rain pounding against the window behind him seemed to build into a roar, yet that voice remained in his ear, repeating his name – _Captain Matthew Crawley? _He was stumbling once more, his feet numb and bleeding. Unable to speak, he had replaced the handset on its cradle and though silence returned, his mind was not quiet; it screamed. Mary had found him, white and shaking behind his desk, his palms flat against the leather writing surface and his head bent. He could not tell her, he couldn't speak and she had sat beside him, her hand on his arm until he felt ready to move.

He did not return there, not in his nightmares; his subconscious did not choose to revisit that time, not anymore. He did dream, but not of the camp, of his fallen men, of the injuries he sustained. Those things were locked away, pushed down. They had run away from him and all that could be summoned of them were snatches, breaks of silence amid the noise, where for a moment, the memory would be in every sensation he felt and all the world would be still. These moments were no longer frightening; they breathed through him, and he returned to the surface once more. But that voice, that human voice in his ear…With one flick of a finger the crystal surrounding the memory had been shattered, and it was a raw pulsing heart, pumping and engorged with blood. The recollection whispered through that voice, spoke of the hell before the peak was reached, before they faced the true depth of hopelessness.

Still, he did not dream of it. When he dreamt it was always of Teddy.

He did not dream every night but when he did it was the same. Ever since the first hint that the war was ending he had dreamt of Teddy, of him coming home, and he winced now to recall it. They had been waiting for weeks, and a barely-contained euphoria simmered in the air. On the streets people broke out in spontaneous smiles and exhortations, but he could not believe it, not until they knew for sure. He hardly dared hope and there was always a buffer on any joy, on the relief that perhaps others felt.

In his dreams he watched from the doorway as Teddy walked towards him up the path, a kit bag in one hand, the other raised in greeting. He looked as he did that day when Matthew had rushed onto the train platform, his chest constricted, his heart pounding in his temples as for one sickening moment he thought he was too late to say goodbye. He had caught sight of Mary and then Teddy, leaning out of the window, his hat in his hand, a smile on his face. Teddy smiled when he came home too, and Matthew flung his arms around him; even now he could feel him there, could smell the mud on Teddy's greatcoat but when Matthew woke there was nothing and the memory of that feeling fell away. Teddy's face was not clear; it was not clear enough. It was only a tenuous vision, and Matthew would roll over and lean across Mary's sleeping form to take the photograph from beside her and look upon Teddy's face in the dark. He would go into the bathroom and shut the door so he could turn on the light, sitting on the edge of the bath and weighing the frame in his hands, his eyes flitting over the edges of the picture before willing himself to look upon it.

So many dark nights of the soul. He knew Mary woke in the night, too, but never at the same time as he did. Though they never woke each other, he knew from the shadows beneath her eyes that she had lain awake beside him in the darkness. He knew when he looked at her that she was not ready to face a new world, a world with no war and no Teddy. The war cushioned them in a way, through those years; it gave a meaning to their grief, a reason for a loss that was so cavernous.

He had tried to prise her away this afternoon, to hear Churchill and the King, to listen to that verbal confirmation and feel something of the relief stirring the nation, but she had refused, kissing him, her fingers on the underside of his jaw as she sent him away and returned to her task. He had stood in the doorway for a moment, looking across the piles dotted around the bedroom, the disparate pieces of her mother's life spread around her in an ocean of jewels, clothes and books, photographs scattered across the eiderdown of, children, grandchildren, dog-eared memories of days past. Every glittering facet of Cora seemed to be in that room, the very essence of her clinging in each swath of fabric, and Mary hid, concealing herself behind her mother's skirts as she never had done as a child.

Matthew rose from the chair and switched off the wireless, his fingers hovering on the knob for a moment as the sound of static died away. He strode to the window and his fingers fell upon the polished table there, his eyes travelling over the silver frames and the photographs within them. When Mary had moved back to the Abbey she had brought the photographs with her, sealed inside a box. He had found them by accident, inside the ottoman in the bedroom they shared. It had been mere weeks since Teddy's funeral and as soon as he'd seen what was inside the box Matthew wished he hadn't looked. But he did look; he took out each picture and laid them on the bed, eight in total, each capturing a different moment, a record of a journey from childhood to the final picture, a juddering halt reached in a serious gaze and an army uniform. He moved the photographs around, in a line from the first to the last and he covered his mouth with his hand as he looked upon the sunny countenance of a child who did not know what awaited him.

Matthew kept his photograph still, the one Richard had given him; he kept it where it had been for the past twenty-seven years, in a pocket and close at hand.

Perhaps it had been ill-advised, the wrong thing to do in the circumstances, but he had gathered the pictures up and found places for them in every room where photographs were already displayed and he placed Teddy there, where he belonged, where he always should have been. Mary had come down one morning to find him in the library, and she had frozen as she caught sight of the photograph on his desk.

"Why is this here?" she asked, her face tense and he had thought he'd made a mistake, he stood up, moistening his lips and reaching across the desk to take her hand.

"I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't have… I just thought," he swallowed, his eyes flickering over her motionless face. "I have always wanted his photograph on my desk."

She hadn't been angry and he had come around the desk and held her against his chest, his cheek pressed to hers so he could still see the photograph turned towards them. He didn't know how long he had spent looking at the pictures before he'd chosen and perhaps it wasn't the obvious choice. Matthew wondered who had taken the photograph and he thought perhaps it had even been Richard. Teddy was three or four years old and he sat on a crumbling wall that separated a flower bed from a lawn, his chin rested on his knees, his arms wrapped around his legs. It was a remarkably still pose for so young a child, and Matthew liked to imagine that it had been the merest flicker of time, that in the next second he had been up, laughing and grinning in the way that Matthew always associated with Teddy at that age. Not that he had really known him then, he had seen him a handful of times in those years after the war. Perhaps that was why he had chosen the photograph; a little piece of something he would never hold, the laugh that followed the flash bulb meant for someone else.

The telephone rang, slicing rudely through his thoughts, but Matthew made no move to answer it, his fingers resting on a photograph and his eyes on the ebb and flow of the landscape outside the window.

* * *

Mary had not stopped moving around the room since Matthew left. Perpetual motion seemed the only way to keep everything inside herself still, even if she accomplished nothing but placing items in a different space on the bed and then moving them back. Her mother's life fluttered from every drawer, as if every compartment closed inside a chest of drawers or dressing table had been straining to be opened, desperate to spill its secrets, to let its life out into the room and colour it vividly. For her mother had been colourful. Mary considered briefly that she should have waited for Sybil and Edith, that this should be something they did together, but they would understand; they would understand that Mary needed to do it, needed to fill her heart with these memories, with the glittering pieces of Cora.

Her mother would have wished to see this day. She'd known the war was drawing to a close, but like everyone else Cora could not quite bring herself to believe it as she watched the blossom colour the tree outside her window, pillow-like blooms shivering in a spring breeze. She had spent much of those last weeks in bed or with her armchair very close to the window so she could look down and see another deluge of rain falling on the ground, the trodden petals like spots of pink paint on the stones outside the Dower House. They had talked for hours or else sat completely silently, Mary engaged in embroidery or a book as Cora slipped in and out of sleep, waking either confused or startlingly lucid, too lucid for comfort at times, her blue eyes snapping open and fixing Mary with a gaze she remembered all too well, a clear, confronting gaze that age had not dulled.

"When I wake I can often feel him holding my hand, "she had said, for whose benefit Mary could not tell, but she fought back the tears anyway as her mother's white hand reached for hers. "I can feel him here for a long time after I come to."

And then Cora's eyes fluttered closed. Teddy's death had crushed them all: it had pulled them together and pressed them into a tight ball of grief until it had become unbearable, until Mary felt nothing but anger at everyone else's tears. She wanted to scream at them, at her mother, Sybil, Edith, the girls, even Matthew. _He was mine and you cannot understand what is lost! _She felt that she had lost her core, everything that spread outwards from that centre no longer connected, no longer making sense, cutting her adrift. She had felt the pain, let it pulse and pound inside a part of her, dipping and peaking until it reached a constant hum that she found she could live with, a level of intensity that she could manage. After that had happened, she was able to listen, and rather than intensifying her own agony, she found that hearing how Teddy had touched others somehow validated her own feelings rather than aggravated them. In those last years she had understand more of her mother than she ever thought she could and she had learnt more of what it meant to love and to lose than she knew possible.

"It isn't what you have lost, my darling. It is what you still have. You still have so much of Teddy."

Cora had been sitting at the window, looking over towards the hill, the sloping wall of trees that Mary felt crept closer to the stones of the Abbey every day, when before they had always seemed so distant. It was almost a year since Teddy's death, and as she laid her hand over her mother's large mahogany jewellery box now, she felt herself flush at the memory.

"How can you say that?" she had spat, angry tears stinging her eyes with a frightening speed. "How dare you say that?" Her heart pounded as her mother watched her. "There is nothing left!"

"I have lost a child, Mary, and I have watched you lose your son. I know you're in pain and I don't think you mean it when you say there is _nothing _left. I am telling you what I see, and I think you should listen," Cora paused and Mary felt herself flinch as each word pierced a little deeper. "I see all he gave us and I see that he gave you and Matthew back to each other."

Incredulous, Mary had been stunned into silence, but Cora had not flinched. She looked back at her and refused to relinquish her gaze. At times her mother's emotions were overdressed, layered under sentiments and motivations that Mary could not or would not identify with, but Cora also had the ability to strike through when it mattered, to make her listen. On that occasion Mary had not wanted to listen, but she had heard and the words had run through her and touched the core, enlivening and cracking through so that the anger turned to something else, to a recognition of a truth she had acknowledged and sought to bury. The reality that life could continue without Teddy.

Mary opened the jewellery box, her fingers on either side of the lid on the smooth wooden surface. It was not an item she recognized, and it had been at the back of the wardrobe beneath a tower of hatboxes. She had already found all of her mother's jewellery, everything that she and her sisters didn't already own, and as the lid fell back on its hinge Mary found she was looking at two tightly packed piles of letters, their edges slightly bent in order that they should fit into the velvet-lined interior of the box. With some difficulty she pressed her fingers in between the wedge of paper and the side of the box and eased the first pile out, it was tied with a faded red ribbon and when she examined the handwriting she recognized her father's sloping hand, the other pile evidently containing letters that Cora had penned. Love letters. Mary felt a surge of discomfort at finding something so very obviously private; photographs were different, one glance and their contents were seen, captured and transferred to the mind, but letters required a conscious process of reading, of exploring, of intruding. She took the other pile out and laid it to one side, and as she did so she saw a loose and crumpled letter pressed at the bottom. It had been smoothed out, ridges and lines running all over its surface to show that it had been pressed into a tight ball before being saved.

The sting across her forehead was the first tingle of recognition, and it quickly escalated into a nauseous surge that seemed to come from nowhere and lodge at the entrance to her throat. When she touched the paper a film of grit clung to its surface, and when she unfolded the single sheet the writing was faded and distorted despite the efforts made to smooth the surface. Nevertheless, Matthew's words remained, where they always had been. She shut her eyes, and Richard was snatching the letter from her hand once more, enveloping it inside his fist. Her hand shook and she placed the letter down on the bed beside her, but found that her eyes could not focus to look at it so she picked it up gingerly again, her heart fluttering in her chest as she began to read.

_18th__ January, 1918_

_Dear Mary,_

_How should I begin? I hardly know. I am writing this, as you may imagine, from a trench. There is far more waiting, far more inaction and boredom, than I had ever anticipated, and most of us fill this time with either writing home or talking of home. Today we are awaiting orders and I know that the coming days are going to leave us little time for such musings. There will be no more waiting and we will long for boredom. We will not remember what it is to be bored. We have seen so much horror, and yet it is so quickly forgotten in these days of tentative silence. We itch, we yearn to fight, and sometimes I wonder at my own desires. I do not want to kill but I want to do what is right and I want us to triumph over the enemy, so kill I must. Most of all I do not want to die, but I wonder how long my luck can continue or why I have been spared when so many others have perished here. I wish to be saved as much as any German. Why should I believe God sides with us, with me against them? I do pray here, for myself, for my men and for you, but does He hear me?_

_Mother and Lavinia write to me. They tell me news of the family and I read their words and listen to the men around me exclaim at the latest happenings in their own letters, far away in distant lives that were once our own. But I do not feel anything. All I can see is the gaps, what is missing in the letters I receive, because how should they know I wish to hear only of you? That in the moments when I can bear to, I think of nothing but you, you fill my dreams; you infiltrate every quiet moment until it is unbearable._

_There is a man here named Graves, and last week he received word that he had become a father. He cried, he pressed his forehead to the earth and thanked God for his son, who is named Theodore, which means 'gift of God.' The nights have been cold and a frost has wrought the air each morning. Graves had been weak since a bout of sickness gripped the camp after Christmas, and yesterday I found him as I passed through the trench during the night to check on the sentries on duty. He was very cold, and even as I called for help I knew he would die. I took his hand and he began to talk, whispering disjointed sentences into the night air. He asked me not to leave him, to stay with him a little while before going for help and so I did. The letter was clutched in his hand, folded and smoothed into a square so it pressed between our palms. He asked me what gift we men, we soldiers, could leave for our sons. I had no immediate answer. I have learnt lessons from war and none greater than the cold fact that we are none of us important here, we matter only as a whole, as a group, a band of men and our individual deeds mean nothing. It is not a gift to be left with the idea that we are not special, that nobody is too important to die, and yet this is the truth. I told Graves that his son would know that he was his father's last gift to the world. I put my arm around his shoulder and he seemed to slip through my fingers. I can only assume it was peaceful, and yet how can it have been, with only me for company, facing nothing but the bitter night air and the absence of all that ever mattered, all that he will not see, the child who will know nothing of him except photographs, letters? What was the point? He came here to die. Was that always to be his fate? I do not wish to upset you in talking of these things, and perhaps it is wrong of me to do so. _

_I wish I could promise to return, but if I am honest I see nothing beyond each moment, each tiny nick in time and I wonder if that is because I am nearing the close. There is so much I wished I had said, so many opportunities that I wish I could take and hold and refuse to let go. I should never have let you go. If I return, not mad, not maimed beyond recognition, then believe that I will love and protect you whatever the cost to anyone else. I am selfish, or I wouldn't have done what I did, what we did. I did it because I wanted you more than the breath that fills my frigid lungs now, and I know that you felt the same. I will release you from any prison, if I am strong and sane enough to do so, if this ever ends and I see the other side, if I come home. If I come home it will be to you and our child, and that is the only truth I can leave you with. I wish I could have told you so when we last met; I wish I had been braver. I only hope that these written words can some how convey the very depth of my feeling and my regret that I did not have the courage before._

_I hesitate to ask anything of you, but if you can, please write to me._

_Yours always,_

_Matthew_

The words shrank and congealed together into ink spots and Mary reached up to catch a tear before it fell onto the paper. _Of course_. The Matthew she had lost close to thirty years ago was resurrected and every word she had wished to hear coursed through her mind as her eyes picked out clipped portions of the text once more. Each sentence sent a bolt, a sharp pain that extended from her stomach to her chest, until it felt like she were holding her breath as she absorbed the words, tentatively, as if stretching apart a scab and feeling dead pieces of stinging flesh fall away to expose the raw fissure beneath. The letter had not only told her something of Matthew; she had felt Richard beside her once more. Richard in those moments when he had laid a gentle hand on her arm, a hand that did not grasp or twist, fingers that smoothed her skin and tried to draw her back. He had suggested Teddy's name; she had flinched from him, but there had been something behind his expression, something in those cool pale eyes and she found that the name, _Theodore_, had stuck in her mind. She had known, when she was able to think more clearly later, that Richard was sorry. That none of it had been what he wanted, that he was compelled and unable to resist taking advantage of the situation. Yet he had regrets and suggested the name given to the child of Matthew's fallen comrade.

How well can we know the contents of anyone's heart? Yet reading those words, Mary felt all of Matthew once more and also a part of Richard she had never really known. She folded the letter in half and looked down at the map of creases on the reverse, at her own fingers curling over the yellowed paper, and she thought of the times this letter had changed hands, of the eyes that had roved its words and that now, all these years on, was the first time it was being read by the person it was intended for. A hand through time.

"Mary?" There was a light rap at the door and Matthew's head appeared around it. She gave him a tremulous smile and he smiled back although his eyes were red, and stepped into the room. "How is it going?" he asked, looking around at the sparkling artifacts nestled in every portion of the room, piled and spread across the carpet. "Have you found anything surprising? I know when I went through Mother's room I found every pair of shoes I'd ever owned as a child." He picked up a photograph and sat down beside her on the counterpane.

"I found a piece of you here," Mary said, and Matthew looked away from the photograph and to the piece of paper she held in her hand, his eyes sparking suddenly with recognition.

"Is that…?" he started, his face pale. "What is it doing here?"

Mary opened the letter and Matthew licked his part open lips with a small shake of his head. "Your mother had my letter?"

"I suppose she must have. I don't know how or why or even if she read it. It was with the letters she and my father exchanged."

Matthew shut his eyes for a moment. "Your father must have found it, after Richard died. That must be how he knew. You never read it?"

Mary shook her head. "Richard took it before I could. I never dreamt he would keep it."

"I thought because you named Teddy, Theodore…" Matthew's voice trailed away and he felt a pressure against his chest as he cast his eyes briefly over the letter, the memory of writing it within touching distance.

"No. It was Richard's idea and for some reason I felt compelled to use it. It felt right. That's strange isn't it?"

He nodded, his eyes drifting away to the window. "That phone call I received, I knew the man's voice. It sounded like Graves, but I knew it couldn't be. It was his son."

"Theodore," Mary said, her voice a whisper, her face shimmering in its whiteness.

"Yes. His widow wrote to me after the war, to thank me for being with him when he died, that she was grateful that he wasn't alone. I never wrote back," he swallowed. "But we were all of us alone out there, so far from all that mattered. He never went home to his son and I never fought for mine."

"Oh, Matthew." She placed the letter down in her lap and reached to clasp his hand, he gripped back fiercely, cracks in the surface of his blue eyes. "You should call that boy, tell him about his father's last moments. Only you can give him that gift."

"I will." He nodded. "Would it have changed anything? If you'd read this at the time?" he asked, his gaze travelling to her lap.

"We cannot know how things would have been different. It does not matter. Then, this piece of paper and Teddy were all I had left of you, and now what matters is that we are together, in spite of everything. I'm sorry I've hidden today. I feel almost as if the war shouldn't end, that if Teddy is gone the world should continue to suffer."

"I understand," Matthew replied and he planted a light kiss on her smooth temple. "And I know we will suffer his loss until the day we die, but the more time passes the more he fills the holes I have felt for so long, the more full my heart becomes. I am more complete now than I ever have been, because I have you and we had Teddy."

Mary leaned against him and let him smooth and kiss her hair, the warmth of his chest radiating through her cheek. Somewhere in the distance a child whooped and the sounds of music filtered through the walls and into their minds as across the years the land was filled, linked with gold thread, two wars converged and entwined to unfold above an endless day of joy, of an ending and a beginning, of the past uncovered, pressed closely into view for a moment before being withdrawn so all that was left was light and everything he gave them. _Say not the struggle naught availeth. _


End file.
